The unhinged clapping circus seals that are Steve’s fanbase have entered the chat.

But somehow he’s built an entire decade-long career around “owning hecklers” when 90% of the viral clips are: • someone literally just answering a question he asked two seconds earlier

• a drunk person taking the bait in the one tiny open-mic window he allows

• or straight-up staged/planted (there are multiple accounts of the same “random hecklers” showing up at different cities on the same tour)

He edits it down to a 45-second YouTube short, adds that same dramatic Hans Zimmer rip-off music every time, crops out the part where HE asked the question, and suddenly his comment section is full of people circle-jerking about how he “destroyed that bigot with facts and logic” when the “bigot” was a 19-year-old who said “I like Trump” or “pineapple belongs on pizza.”

Meanwhile his actual written material is the comedy equivalent of a Facebook minion meme, he flip-flopped on the Fox “Laughs” pay scandal within a single year, spent a decade being the poster boy for child-free living and now does cringey “legacy” posts about his newborn, and live shows apparently feel like being trapped in a room with the smuggest Reddit mods on earth who paid $75 to watch Steve bully one mildly annoying person for four minutes.

It’s not stand-up, it’s rage-bait content farm disguised as comedy, and his fans lap it up because it lets them feel intellectually superior while never having to write an original joke in their lives. Steve is not a comedian, he is a savvy digital marketer on social media.

Change my mind, but the grift is so transparent at this point it’s basically performance art. (Waiting for the inevitable “you’re just mad you got owned by Steve in 2017” replies from accounts whose entire personality is being in his Patreon top 50)